OS Nostalgia and Disappointment
Ten years ago, when I was starting my computer science training, I was a major fan of OpenVMS. OpenVMS, of course, will not run on my laptop, so I needed a solution to run on my standard-issue laptop. Linux was still in its infancy, especially on laptop hardware, so I began to play around with other operating systems. Eventually, a friend of mine turned me on to an operating system called BeOS. Superfast to boot, BeOS was based around a microkernel and a strong graphical user interface (“GUI”) design philosophy.
Today, the original BeOS project is defunct. A group of dedicated enthusiasts are working to bring the project back under the new name of HaikuOS. While Haiku continues to be as fast and lightweight as the old BeOS was, I can’t help but think that the GUI is stuck in the distant past.
After I overcame my nostalgia for BeOS, I started thinking that GUI operating systems have not done much to evolve in the past 25 years.
To be clear, when I speak of “operating systems”, I’m talking about the entire operating environment. This includes the user interface and software that corresponds to the platform. Operating systems per se are quite boring, technical and, theoretically, invisible to the user.
For starters, it seems that users themselves are to blame. Most consumers of operating systems are not especially sophisticated. It would be hard for software writers make a radical departure from the traditional “computer as a desktop” analogy that users have come to expect. After all, most users learn to operate a computer by rote task and not on a more abstract level. This approach will significantly hamper any attempts at change.
Designers are not free from blame, however. A good operating system presents features and functions intuitively, helping the user workflow. Rather than trying to come up with new ways to interface with computers, most operating systems tend to focus on “eye candy” aspects of design. While these polishing efforts are both necessary and appreciated, the fact remains that today’s operating system is, from the user perspective, not much different than it was when the GUI first came to be.
As we begin to move towards more specialized computing applications, such as smartphones, perhaps the operating system will finally be able to evolve. Apple’s iPhone OS (I’m sure Google’s Android and Palm’s webOS both do this, although I do not have any first-hand experience) changes the traditional user experience by eliminating much of the OS workflow that is irrelevant to the use of a smartphone.
